


The Sweetest Friendships

by Loopy456



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 20:50:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loopy456/pseuds/Loopy456
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>‘I don’t believe in friends.’</i>
</p><p>All his life, Sherlock never needed anyone. Sentiment. Weakness. Distractions. Predictable. Then came John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sweetest Friendships

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I’m not supposed to be writing any more (exams blah…), but I stumbled across a quote that I’d forgotten that I loved and it struck me how much it reminded me of John and Sherlock. I wasn’t intending to write something straight away but after revising all day I needed something to unwind, so this was written in a couple of hours last night.
> 
> So, here is something sweet that I shouldn’t be writing while I take a quick break from all the angst that I definitely shouldn’t be writing either.

_‘The sweetest friendships of all are the unlikeliest, for they are founded on something even more precious than delight. They are founded on nothing less than the complete and perfect acceptance of one by another.’_

'Lark Rise to Candleford', BBC1

 

Sherlock Holmes stopped believing in God when he was five years old.

It was Alice at school who he spoke to about it, who got him thinking. She was new, and that was the only reason she talked to him. All the other boys and girls avoided him now; they had done for months.

One break time, Sherlock was conducting an experiment at the water trough when she came over and stood next to him and made it clear that she wasn’t going to leave.

‘You go to church,’ he told her, speaking the first observation that came into his head before bending back over his equipment.

‘I do,’ she said, inexplicably pleased. ‘How did you know? Did you speak to Mummy?’

‘No,’ scoffed Sherlock. ‘It’s obvious. Shall I tell you why?’

She nodded. He did.

‘You must be awfully clever,’ she said admiringly, when he was done.

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘I am.’

He thought that was that, but unfortunately he seemed to have picked a subject on which Alice was keen.

‘Do you go to church then too?’ she asked. ‘Which church do you go to? Do you like it? Do you get biscuits afterwards?’

‘Mummy takes me,’ Sherlock replied shortly. He was reaching a crucial part of his experiment.

‘Oh good,’ said Alice. ‘I’m glad you go too. God is my best friend, you know.’

Sherlock frowned at her.

‘I’m concentrating,’ he said severely.

‘Can I help?’

‘No.’

She took this as permission to stand and continue talking about God and church and something to do with cannibals. Sherlock realised, as he silently fumed about not being able to proceed with his experiment in peace, that he probably shouldn’t delete church every Sunday after lunch.

Alice continued to talk as Sherlock continued to experiment. He didn’t understand why she couldn’t go and talk to someone else about this tiresome subject. It wasn’t like he was even encouraging her.

‘Why are you telling me these things?’ Sherlock asked her eventually, confused and more than a little irritated.

‘I’m your friend,’ she said, equally confused but not at all irritated.

Sherlock blinked. He remembered the first week of school and how glad he’d been that living with Mycroft had quickly taught him how to hide his tears. 

Alice was his friend? Well, he knew how that was going to end.

‘I don’t need friends,’ he said fiercely.

Alice wasn’t so adept at hiding tears.

***

Even if Alice wasn’t his friend - and she wasn’t, because who needed friends when it only ended badly? - she had still sparked an interest in Sherlock. He hated not knowing, so he went home and found as many books on the matter in his father’s study as he could.

He read as much as he could, he was only five after all, but there didn’t seem to be a consensus. It was frustrating.

Sherlock interrogated Mycroft when he arrived home from school for the weekend.

‘Do you believe in God?’ he demanded.

‘I go to church,’ Mycroft replied carefully.

‘That’s not an answer,’ said Sherlock, because it wasn’t.

‘It doesn’t matter what I believe in,’ Mycroft told him, taking in his younger brother’s determined stance. ‘What matters is what you believe. You must evaluate the evidence for yourself and come to a reasonable conclusion.’

‘But I do not know what the reasonable conclusion is,’ Sherlock grumbled, trying to resist the urge to stamp his foot. He wasn’t a baby.

‘Well, maybe’s there’s more than one,’ said Mycroft cryptically.

Sherlock decided there and then that Mycroft was talking about as much sense as usual and left him to it.

More than one reasonable conclusion, indeed.

Unfortunately, his curiosity had drawn him back to Mycroft’s room after dinner. No matter how much of a pain Mycroft was, he did sometimes have a point and Sherlock was determined to find it.

‘How can there be more than one reasonable conclusion?’ he asked, hopping up onto Mycroft’s bed and staring across at his brother, sat at his desk.

‘You should be in bed,’ Mycroft informed him severely. ‘What would Mummy say?’

‘How can there be more than one reasonable conclusion?’ Sherlock repeated firmly.

Mycroft sighed.

‘Look, Sherlock,’ he said gently. ‘People believe in all sorts of different things. Some people believe in one god, some believe in many, some believe in none. Some people believe in chance and luck and fate, some believe in love, some believe in friendship, some believe in hope. There’s no telling who is right or wrong, or how many right answers there are. That’s why it’s called faith.’

‘Alice at school said that God is her friend,’ Sherlock said.

‘Perhaps,’ Mycroft nodded. ‘That is indeed the general consensus among Christians, that God is one’s friend.’

‘Are we Christians?’ Sherlock frowned.

‘Mummy and Father are, and we’re baptised into that faith, yes.’

There was a short period of silence. Mycroft observed his younger brother turning it all over in that extraordinary brain of his.

‘I don’t need friends,’ Sherlock declared suddenly.

‘Maybe that’s your answer, then.’

And so that became Sherlock’s reasonable conclusion. He didn’t need friends and he didn’t need God, so there was no need to believe in them.

***

He dabbled in later life, of course. Following Mycroft to prep school aged seven, he quickly decided that the boys in his dormitory were not worth his effort. 

It wasn’t that he shouldn’t have tried in the first place, of course, because one shouldn’t pass up on the opportunity to collect new data. It was just that he was right in the conclusion he had drawn two years ago. Waste of time. He was fine alone. He was better alone.

‘I don’t believe in friends.’

He repeated it like a prayer, while everyone else was indeed praying dutifully in the school chapel. Dull. Boring. Predictable. At least while they were praying it stopped them from laughing and pointing and flicking stones at him.

_Sticks and stones, Sherlock Holmes, sticks and stones._

Secondary school was no better. The useful thing was that it also served to reinforce the conclusion, which Sherlock acknowledged was always worthwhile. It wasn’t that he tried to make friends; it was that everyone around him thought that he should be trying to make friends and was under the impression that not having friends was something that he should be upset about.

He certainly didn’t want friends if that was the way other people behaved.

‘You’re such a loser,’ one boy spat at him in the dining hall at breakfast. ‘No wonder you haven’t got any friends, you little freak.’

‘I don’t believe in friends,’ Sherlock replied smoothly, moving away with his cup of tea before the boy and his friends could dredge up some other unimaginative insult to throw at him.

_Making friends only hurts you. It is a waste of resources to invest time and energy in something which will end so inevitably badly._

The things he dabbled in became more outlandish as he grew up. He stopped even the most tentative experiments with making friends and started new ones. His new experiments involved alcohol and drugs and sex, all of which unfortunately involved human interaction and led people to the mistaken conclusion that he was their friend.

Sebastian and Victor both lasted a little time, until all the old issues from school resurfaced and Sherlock found himself once more staring at the retreating head of someone who thought he was a freak and had no qualms with informing him of that fact.

‘I don’t believe in friends,’ Sherlock hissed into his pillow that evening.

He didn’t believe in cocaine, either, but it dulled the boredom and the pain that he wouldn’t even acknowledge existed.

_Loneliness is for wimps._

Even though he wasn’t where he was meant to be, Mycroft found him and hauled him out of the literal and metaphorical gutter he was curled up in.

There and then, Sherlock stopped believing in brothers.

***

A police sergeant by the name of Lestrade actually got him clean, because Sherlock didn’t care enough to try for his brother and anyway, where was the incentive? It wasn’t that he was an addict, oh no, but his brain was rotting with boredom and cocaine managed to ease that somewhat. Helping the police eased it even more. Who needed cocaine?

The work took him all over London and beyond, and opened doors for him unofficially that made his life even less boring.

The pathologist working in the morgue at St Bartholomew’s took a shine to him.

‘Why do you talk to me?’ Sherlock asked her bluntly, one afternoon.

‘Well,’ she blushed. ‘You’re my friend, I just thought - ’

‘I don’t believe in friends,’ Sherlock said.

***

It turned out that landlords didn’t tend to be particularly understanding about small explosions or chemicals in the microwave. They also weren’t especially delighted with stern letters from the council about animal remains in the recycling bin.

Sherlock found himself homeless more times than he cared to recall, and as Mycroft hadn’t yet seen fit to give him control of his trust fund he soon found himself at a bit of a loss.

‘Why don’t you find yourself a flatmate?’ Stamford, the rotund, irritating and arguably well-meaning doctor, asked him.

‘I think I’d be a bit of a difficult man to find a flatmate for,’ Sherlock replied delicately, not looking up from his petri dish.

‘Not got any friends who could help you out?’

‘I don’t believe in friends.’

***

‘That… was amazing.’

It took Sherlock four whole seconds to reply.

‘Extraordinary. Quite extraordinary.’

***

‘That sergeant,’ John said conversationally over dinner. ‘She said you don’t have friends.’

‘No, I don’t believe in friends,’ replied Sherlock, a little irritably. He always was hungry after a case.

‘Ah,’ said John. And then, ‘Well, just because you don’t believe in something it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.’

Sherlock cocked his head to one side.

***

Against all the odds, John stayed. After two and a half months, Sherlock began concocting ridiculous experiments to test John’s patience and his perseverance. 

Another five weeks later, he stopped trying. It looked like John was here for good.

***

Sherlock Holmes still doesn’t believe in God. He still doesn’t believe in brothers and he still doesn’t believe in the abstract concept of friends, but perhaps believing in _something_ is enough.

 

_‘The sweetest friendships of all are the unlikeliest, for they are founded on ... nothing less than the complete and perfect acceptance of one by another.’_


End file.
